


The Price of Home

by picklebridge



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Heavy Angst, Post-Battle of Five Armies, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-05
Updated: 2015-01-05
Packaged: 2018-03-05 14:56:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3124340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/picklebridge/pseuds/picklebridge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dís wears their sigils upon her sleeves, silent relics of a brighter dawn. The raised lines of coloured thread run smoother than river water under her finger tips, familiar shapes taking hold in the cavernous halls of her heart. Three sets of geometric lines, and they are all she has left.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Price of Home

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this waaay before bofa came out but I edited it today as some sort of catharsis. Like Dís, I feel like the grieving wreck left behind after that movie. Ah, my boys, why did you leave me??  
> My [Tumblr](http://picklebridge.tumblr.com) is here, come say hi and cry about dead Durins with me.

Dís wears their sigils upon her sleeves, silent relics of a brighter dawn. The raised lines of coloured thread run smoother than river water under her finger tips, familiar shapes taking hold in the cavernous halls of her heart. Three sets of geometric lines, and they are all she has left.

Erebor is echoing around her, familiar halls and faceted stone blank with an absence that nobody else quite seems to feel. These tunnels echo with her footsteps when instead they should echo with the bright laughter of her sons. The Lonely Mountain has always held her family and without them she feels like an imposter - or worse still, a wraith slowly descending into vapour, too stretched thin by grief.

Death has always been an ache in her bones. Since childhood the people she cares about have been stripped away from her one by screaming one, but before now it has been her gift to push it back, to keep the weight off her shoulders. 

Only now there is nobody to be strong for. There is nobody to need her comfort now, and in turn she herself can no longer find peace. Dís can feel despair chipping away at her foundations, the pain of every single missing face crushing down on her without the buffer of her boys. Nowadays she feels like nothing more than scattered fragments of memory and the threads of her old life. They hang heavy inside her, gathering dust. She is the only one now who remembers.

The fact of the matter is that without her family, the Lonely Mountain remains just that. Erebor lies a ghost without the force of the living; and what is she now but the remains of the dead? The throne room feels too much like her brother, the vaulted halls filled with the bedtime tales of her restless sons. Their dreams cloud the mountain until she chokes, constant reminders of what could have been and what was all at once.

Dain does well by her, but Dís can never quite meet his eyes. When she is near, he shifts restless in his seat – for all his virtues, it was never made for him.

Sometimes she sits by her fallen kin, though the days she can face them come few and far between, and she soaks up the harsh ice of the tombs. They call her the Guard of Durin when they think she can’t hear them, and it widens the gaping chasm in her heart. What good is that now? What good is a guard in death, when they are left only as broken bones? Balin has told her how her boys died curled together, Fíli’s arms shielding his brother up until the last.

Thorin had outlived them by mere hours, he told her thickly, and had begged for her forgiveness at his end.

Most of her lets her brother rest easy, knows there is nothing to forgive. Those reckless sunshine boys of hers would never have stayed home under her watchful eye. Even in youth they had disappeared from their beds, clambering through the woods in their nightclothes to feel the morning dew on their skin.

But even so, a bitter granule still remains in her heart, swelling in its biting coldness whenever the day draws veiled. If only that accursed pride hadn’t gotten the better of Thorin, noble fool that he was. If only his haunted shell had not been quite so thick. If only he’d stayed at home with her, humming gently as he whittled in front of the fire. If only the call of that _blasted_ dragon and the desperate echo of a thousand ancestors had not proven so strong.

If only.

She would have melted down the king’s crown herself if only to ease the burden resting on his brows, to subdue the ghosts whispering dead desires in his ears. Thorin rebuilt their people from the twisted roots of their burning tree, coaxing it back from the ashes with love and ceaseless care. Dís wishes more than anything that he could have seen the love afforded him in return, plagued as he was by the guilt of the fallen. In her more hopeful moments she hopes he can hear the songs they still sing of him, their golden king.

They sing of her sons too, her beautiful children. It is this final blow that breaks her heart until she shatters. They serenade two silver princes where she can only see innocent eyes and sticky fingers, mud tracked into the house behind them. She has lost many in her long years, but it is the loss of her children that has truly left her hollow. She can still remember how they were the day they left, shoulder to shoulder and full of promise.

Oh, Kíli, her dear wild one. How excited he had been, up at the crack of dawn with nerves and dragon fire in his blood. How finite and brilliant he had been in the light of the rising sun. And Fíli, her beautiful lion, her eldest. On her doorstep he had no longer seemed a boy. The strong warm young man in his place moved with such laughing surety her heart had fluttered to see it, the first glimpses of the king he could be peering out of his young face.

And clear as day, she remembers them walking away. That last glimpse of them will haunt her, she knows, until she joins them. Side by side, shoulder to shoulder, voices floating happily back towards her on the wind. She will be chasing those voices for the rest of her life.

Dís still finds herself forgetting sometimes, in moments that she is half awake or absent minded. It cuts anew each time she looks up and their names die again against her tongue, the emptiness of the air around her like a bitter wind in her bones. They are the first things she thinks of when she wakes and the last thing she pictures when she sleeps, because she is terrified of losing the way Kíli snuffled in his sleep and the way Fíli’s hands were always cold. Already she can feel the memories trickling away from her, and as they fade, it is the little things that matter most. The day she forgets the lilt of Thorin’s rare drunken giggles, it will not be long before she forgets the sensation of him being there at all.

The mountain lives on. Her boys do not. Voices, laughter, music. It echoes above them, but the Sons of Durin have deaf ears. Dís has their sigils tattooed over her knuckles, because it is the closest she will ever get to holding them in her arms again.


End file.
